2008 October

There is a scene in the 1955 Looney Tunes short called "Sahara Hare" in which Yosemite Sam is attempting to enter a castle in the desert. After various failed methods of forced entry he encounters a secret entrance in the wall of the castle. When Sam opens the door there is another one immediately behind […]

In this blog entry, I’d like discuss and explore the characteristics that define an Exceptional DBA. Few DBAs will have all these characteristics, but the best DBAs will have most of them. Enjoys Technology If you are reading this blog entry, then I think I can reasonably assume that you already enjoy technology, a […]

The Devils Manual for IT Managers Part 3: Phrases with which to discourage ideas This is the third in my series of hints for aspiring IT managers. Here, we give you put-down phrases for discouraging ideas. No IT Manager really likes having to deal with ideas. They tend to destroy the harmony and equilibrium in […]

Several recent events have been unsettling for many IT Managers. The recent collapse of banks has led to FBI investigations in the States, and groups of shareholders in the both the States and the UK have threatened litigation. At the time I write, there is evidence of criminal activity but not enough for prosecutions. There […]

Like every other IT manager, I’ve always been instinctively attracted to technologies that I don’t really understand. I’m not sure why this is. Is it part of the human condition? I suspect that it may be due to one of the puzzling side-effects of testosterone, which is the urge to have the latest technology.Marketing department […]

I’m happy to see features and services of SQL Server deprecated by Microsoft if it is for a good reason. Good reasons include conformance with SQL Standards or rejection by the community of users; I consider Microsoft’s commercial convenience to be a bad reason. I suspect that everything possible has been said about Microsoft […]

Microsoft PDC is upon us again for the first time in three years. There is a packed 5-day agenda running from Sunday October 26th through to Thursday October 30th. I always get excited about going away with Red Gate. It’s such a big change from the work that we all do in the office. Much […]

Recently at an IndyPASS meeting I facilitated a general question and answer session preceding our regularly scheduled feature presentation for the month. There was a lot of great questions covering many aspects of SQL Server; but I was most excited to hear some great questions in regard to Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). In the next […]

Over the past few years we’ve seen a proliferation of new technologies from Microsoft. We have WPF, WWF, WCS, WCF, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, The entity framework, LINQ, Expression Studio, TFS, DLR, DSL… The list already appears endless, and in another two years we can probably add another half dozen technologies based around Windows 7, the […]

This week’s time-eater, for me, was to try to create an installer package (MSI) with custom actions that install databases on SQL Servers. Typically, I had grown to like Microsoft Visual Studio Deployment Projects, because I could easily knock out some C# code and slam it into an installer and get it to do, basically, […]